Tag Archives: President Reagan

There’s an old story that occasionally makes the rounds in Washington. In the 1970s, a magazine (now long defunct) named New Times reported that Sen. William Scott, a Virginia Republican, had been ranked the “dumbest” senator in a survey conducted by a public interest group. Subsequently, Scott held a press conference to deny the charge — thereby proving he was pretty darn dumb. After all, he only called more attention to the accusation.

Sarah Palin has taken a Scott-like position.

Earlier this month, PolitiFact.com, a project of the St. Petersburg Times, awarded Palin the not-so-coveted “lie of the year” award for claiming last summer that President Obama‘s health care reform initiative would set up “death panels” run by bureaucrats who would decide if seniors and disabled citizens “based on a subjective judgment of their ‘level of productivity in society’ ” would be “worthy of health care.” PolitiFact.com explains:

On Aug. 10, PolitiFact rated Palin’s statement Pants on Fire [its highest — or lowest — rating]. In the weeks that followed, health care policy experts on both the right and the left said the euthanasia comparisons were inaccurate. Gail Wilensky, a health adviser to President George H.W. Bush, said the charge was untrue and upsetting.

According to an Associated Press article from October 2007, Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s time as chairman of the International Republican Institute connected him to a wide range of international interests. We now know this included Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi, whom the McCain-Palin campaign is smearing in the press in an attempt to dissuade Americans from voting for presidential candidate Barack Obama. Additionally, McCain and the IRI had a long list of corporate donors, including Blackwater USA, the paramilitary security firm responsible for killing 11 innocent Iraqi civilians, investment bank Lehman Bros., corporate lobbying firms and big oil companies such as Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP.